COVID-19 more likely to infect people at home: Study
A health worker takes a nasal swab sample from a youth to test for the COVID-19 coronavirus at a testing centre in Srinagar on July 21, 2020
South Korean epidemiologists have found that people were more likely to contract the Wuhan virus infection from members of their hosehold.
A study published in the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) focuses on 5,706 “index patients” who had tested positive for the virus. Index patients are the first persons in a group known to be suffering from a disease or medical condition.
The study also involved more than 59,000 people who came in contact with them. The data was collected between January 20 and March 27 when the deadly virus was spreading fast and daily infections in South Korea reached itspeak.
The findingsshow that just two out of 100 infected people had caught the virus from non-household contacts and one in ten caught the infection from their own families.
The infection rate within the household was higher when the first confirmed cases were teenagers or people in their 60s and 70s.
According to one of the authors of the study, some age groups are more likely to be in close contact with family members as the group is in more need of protection or support.
Children with COVID-19 were more likely to be asymptomatic as compared to adultswhich also made it harder to identify index cases within that group.
The study makes the home seem like it is not a safe place after all. Simply put staying home is importantbut it might not be enough.